Wednesday, 14 January 2009

Germinal by Émile Zola

When I was at Waterstone’s Gower Street in December for an event with Tibor Fischer, I had an interesting conversation with Nicholas Crane, author of Great British Journeys. He asked me what my favourite book was, and my immediate reply was Germinal by Émile Zola.

I translated Germinal in 1996 for Frassinelli Editore (now part of Mondadori), having previously translated a collection of his short-stories for a small independent publisher. I was delighted when I was commissioned this translation, because Zola has always been one of my favourite writers since my university years in Rome, and Germinal one of the “important” books I still had not had the chance to read. So when I replaced the receiver I said to myself: “How lucky… at least an author I like.”

That same day I started reading the book, and was totally hooked from page one. The opening, with Étienne Lantier walking across the dark fields and the night-time description of the mine – the Voreux – is breathtaking.

What I liked about Germinal is the way Zola manages to conjure up an entire world in a coherent and realistic way, developing at the same time universal themes of love, death, solitude, betrayal and rebellion. Nobody is a winner in his world – neither the rich nor the poor – with the mine constantly devouring humans like a fiendish beast.

A real masterpiece and a very modern novel – a book I would recommend to anybody.

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Alessandro Gallenzi is the founder of Alma Books and Alma Classics, and the successor of John Calder at the helm of Calder Publications. As well as being a literary publisher, he is a translator, a poet, a playwright and a novelist. His collection of poetry Modern Bestiary - Ars Poetastrica was published in 2005 to critical acclaim and his novel Bestseller was published in 2010.

Alma Books publishes from fifteen to twenty titles a year, mostly contemporary literary fiction, taking around sixty per cent of its titles from English-language originals, while the rest are translations from other languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, German and Japanese. Alma Books also publishes two or three non-fiction titles each year.

Alma Classics aims to publish the greatest recognized masterpieces of all time, from every literature and genre, but also tries to redefine and enrich the classics canon by promoting unjustly neglected works of enduring significance. Recently Alma Classics launched Overture Publishing, which provides a series of beautifully produced opera and classical-music guides which are unique in the English language.